The First Posters of Faye Are Up!

Final Faye Poster

Today was a big day for the new PR plan for Flesh Wound!  Today, I went to two major universities in town and hung up the poster that announces the new website dedicated to Flesh Wound.  First I'll tell you about the poster, and then I'll tell you about posting it.

The image to the left, obviously, is the poster.  It is designed very simply.  There is an eye-catching image of a woman wearing a latex miniskirt and red corset, which is intended to represent Faye and the work she does in Flesh Wound.  Then there is a simple phrase above the image – Do You Know Faye? – and the URL for the Flesh Wound website below the image.  A simple black border focuses the viewer's eye to the image and words, and creates a space for the message on the poster that is separate from anything else that might be hung around the same area.

The design of the poster is intentionally clean and simple.  I knew that these posters would be placed in areas of high foot traffic, and I figured that at the most, I would be able to have the viewer's attention for maybe 1 or 2 seconds.  That's it.  In that time, the poster had to capture their attention and deliver a message compelling enough for them to take some sort of action.  With luck, the image would make the viewer stop and look more closely at the poster, but I couldn't bank on that.  So I chose an eye-catching image tied in with the theme of the book, hoping to make the viewer look twice.  The phrase – Do You Know Faye? – is first and foremost brief.  You can read that in 1 second or less, and with boldface type you can be some distance from the poster and still read it.  The fact that it is a question will trigger people's automatic response to consider it and hopefully spark their curiosity.  Is this someone they know?  What is this poster about?  The URL underneath the picture is long, but I used a larger font on the book title than the other part of the URL, and capitalized the letters of each word.  I also decided to keep the '/wordpress' at the end because most viewers on college campuses will know that means this is a blog.

My hope is that lots of students see the poster and check out the URL.  If I can get them to the site, the site ought to do the rest to spark their interest in the book.

Then this morning, armed with fifty copies of the poster, I drove to Marquette University.  MU is my undergraduate alma mater, and a Jesuit university.  I am not certain how that fact will affect how the poster is received, but given the fact that MU is full of 18 to 22 year old adults, I was ready to assume a certain level of open-mindedness.

I bundled up because it was cold and windy today – 36 degrees with a brisk wind, making it feel like 26 outside.  My first stop was the Union, a central gathering place for students of all courses of study.  I was able to put up three posters there; one in a coffee house designed for studying, and two others in high traffic entrance points.  I was surprisingly nervous!  When I put up the poster in the coffee shop there were at least a dozen students who could see me do it, but I didn't feel like I attracted much attention.  The other posting areas were on bulletin boards directly above an area full of deeply cushioned armchairs.  I basically had to stand next to two coeds while I posted one of them, and lean over a sweatshirted student punching away at a laptop keyboard while another dozed in a chair a few feet away to post the third.  Once the posters were up I felt good about how they looked, though, and then I set off to find the bulletin boards in other buildings on campus.

All told, I posted ten posters on Marquette's campus in these buildings:

-Union (3)

-Health Sciences

-Physics

-Chemistry

-Languages

-Business

-Journalism

-Varsity Theater

After that, I drove a few miles to UW-Milwaukee, the other major university in town.  I'm not as familiar with the UWM campus, so it took me a while to orient myself.  I started with the Student Union, but although the space was enormous, modern, and well designed, it seemed like there was no place to post things.  So after wandering around for a bit, I spied a set of offices devoted to the local LBTG community (for those of you who don't know, that acronym stands for Lesbian Bisexual and Trans-Gender) on campus.  I asked the very kind, helpful person there about posting things and he told me that the Union controlled postings very closely, but there were public bulletin boards in most of the other buildings on campus.

Before leaving the Union, I did find a local coffeehouse – 8th Note – and they did have a bulletin board there.  So I did put up a Faye poster, under the watchful gaze of a half dozen students playing cards.  Then I left and walked the campus in the freezing cold, putting posters in the following buildings on campus:

-Bolton Hall (2)

-Lubar Business Building

-Curtin Hall

-Pearse Hall

-Architecture and Urban Planning Building (2)

-Lapham Geosciences

-Chemistry

-Engineering

Then it was time to come home and pick up my daughter from school.  The final tally for the day was 21 posters placed, 10 at Marquette and 11 at UWM.  My next step will be to go back to these campuses on Monday and see that the posters are still in place.  I'm curious about that.  I don't know if the image is too provocative for those environments, but I don't think it is.  I'll also be interested to see if the web traffic on the Flesh Wound site spikes.

So I'm stoked, and it was a big day!  I'll let you know what I find on Monday!  In the meantime, have a terrific weekend and read something that transports you to some other place!  Thanks for reading.  -Jon